


The One Who Knows

by superfluouskeys



Series: 7 Days of Fic for 777 Followers [6]
Category: Hunger Games Series - All Media Types, Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins
Genre: Alternate Ending, F/F, angsty fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-02
Updated: 2017-04-02
Packaged: 2018-10-13 21:50:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,065
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10522602
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/superfluouskeys/pseuds/superfluouskeys
Summary: Effie makes a visit to the newly-reconstructed District Twelve.  Katniss struggles with the notion of wanting more than mere survival.





	

Needless to say I wasn't happy to see her at first.  That she seemed happy to see me, in a way that was softer and more genuine than before, felt jarring and wrong.

Everything about her was softer now, and it wasn't particularly becoming on her.  Without all her crazy Capitol fashions, she seemed somehow blurred, hazy, or washed out.  Then again, to be fair, the "natural" look was the new Capitol fashion these days.

Things were...different.  Changing.  Mostly better.  Entire districts weren't being bombed or starved out anymore, at least, and the retributive Hunger Games idea had been, barely, voted down.  The tone of the announcement was not as celebratory as one would think: it seemed pretty clear to most of us that the threat of its resurgence remained.  Any small relief we might feel was as a calm before a storm.  It could be taken away at any moment, replaced by something worse than we could have imagined.  Those in power never ran out of surprising new ways to ruin lives, I'd learned.

And now here was Effie Trinket, with her natural dirty blonde hair pulled away from her face the way any other person might wear it, like some kind of bizarre ghost from a past I both desperately wanted to put behind me and pathetically clung to as all I had ever known.

I first caught sight of her when she was just arriving, descending from the newly reconstructed train platform, flanked by other similarly toned down versions of Capitol citizens.  They were still distinguishable from the others--their "natural" looks were a little too perfect to be real.

I didn't stand out much anymore--I looked more or less like most other surviving residents of District 12 who had returned to rebuild--but somehow she spotted me, anyway.  Our eyes met and she smiled and I scowled, but I couldn't quite look away, couldn't quite bring myself to just ignore that she was here and go home and never think of her again.

She found me a few days later, and thugh I was sure it was unintentional, it didn't feel that way at the time.  Her presence felt like some kind of personal attack.  I was pacing the district, just short of listless, assessing the growth and the damage, the steps forward and the steps backward, all the while desperately trying to ignore the shape of problems more personal, and there she was again, equal parts growth and damage, a spectre hovering above the sprigs of green grass and the scars of old wreckage that wouldn't be so easily patched up and grown over.

"Katniss," she said.  It was hesitant, surprised, fragile.  It made me sick.

"Effie," I spat back.

"You're...looking well."

I felt my fists clenching at my sides.  "You're looking...different," I replied, and relished the petty satisfaction of watching a shadow of insecurity fall across her face.

"I had...well." she focused her attention somewhere around my shoulder.  "I won't disturb you any longer."

And then she was gone, and to my immense displeasure, I didn't feel nearly as vindicated as I had a moment ago.  What I did feel, in a way I'd never really thought to feel before, was alone.

I found her the next time, and maybe that put me in a better place for not lashing out, or maybe it was the way she looked in that moment, like something out of a thousand tiny fragments of memory that seemed utterly unreal to me after all that had followed them.

She was kneeling in a little field outside of town, just past where the fence used to be, just past where the firebombs had so precisely torn the district apart.  The grass was darker and thicker here, and dotted with weeds and wildflowers.  Effie was staring at one such patch of wildflowers with genuine anguish in her eyes, an emotion so bold and so raw that it turned my stomach, and I had to swallow a lump in my throat before I could manage to speak.

"Effie?"

She looked up, and her natural eyes were cool grey-blue like the sky.  The last colour I remembered was the bright amber, I thought, or maybe the pink.  Her eyes shone with tears the last time, too, but I hadn't cared.  They had sickened me then.

"Katniss."

Neither of us moved for a moment after that.  All at once I wasn't sure why I had even stopped and spoken to her, why I'd been hoping I'd run into her again when I'd been so unhappy to see her before.  But I'd started to realize that my mind didn't work through problems this way.  Give it too much feeling talk to mull over at one time, and it shut down completely for the foreseeable future.

So with that in mind, I sat down next to her in the grass.  Maybe it didn't matter why I'd stopped just now, only that I had.

She reached out, ran the tips of her fingers over the little blossoms of the wildflowers.  "I never saw these when I came here before," she said.

"They were always here," I responded.  If you knew where to look.  If you knew to look beyond where they allowed you to.

"How is...?"

Bile rose in my throat.  It wasn't anger, or even resentment anymore, not really, but a deep-seated kind of guilt I didn't know how to process.  "Fine," I said, and I meant to stop there, but more came spilling out without my permission.  "As fine as he can be.  He talks about children like he wants them and the idea just..."  I clenched my fists against my thighs, and hung my head so that all I could see was green grass and weeds and wildflowers.

"And Haymitch?" Effie wondered.  "I hadn't..."

"Dead."

"Oh."

"It seemed..." I struggled to latch onto the words for what I'd thought about the way he looked at the time.  It was always so much easier to think or to write than to speak.  "It seemed like a relief to him, in the end," I managed at last.  "And I understood it."

Silence reigned between us then, thick and heavy and suffocating, until, "I am so sorry," Effie whispered suddenly, and then everything seemed somehow to go cold.

"For what?" I wondered, attempting flatness and achieving tremulousness.

"Everything," said Effie.  Her hand found mine in the grass, cold and soft and shocking, and I didn't pull away.

We talked more after that.  It seemed lighter, somehow, and more real, now that the most obvious and cumbersome things had been said.  I realized how little we'd spoken in all the time we'd spent together before.  I guessed before she hadn't been a real person to me.  I'd figured she was the usual Capitol citizen, vapid and full of little more than propaganda, and not worth talking to any more than strictly necessary.

As it turned out, she was an actual human, who had things to say that were at least as interesting to listen to as anything else I'd heard recently.  Before it hadn't been easy for me to feel sympathy for the Capitol citizens when Twelve was starved and beaten within an inch of its life, but their suffering under the old regime had come in other ways.

I could see it now, with years of distance from the worst of it.  I could see that they, too, were people who were suffering.  It was the unformed thought that had led me to shoot Coin, to oppose the continuation of the Hunger Games in the form of revenge.  New suffering would not make up for old.

So I listened.  And asked questions when they came.  And heard, and understood.

Effie had far more questions for me, was more talkative in general, and I didn't always have good answers to give her.  There were so many things I'd blocked out, or shoved forcibly aside without further thought, and many more still that I was deeply unwilling to even try to speak aloud.

Sometimes I snapped back at her instead of answering, or saying I didn't want to answer.  Sometimes she said something I found so dismissive or otherwise unpalatable that I scoffed or yelled senseless words just to silence her.  But we spoke until the sun hung low in the sky, and when we stood to part, Effie asked if she might see me again, and I found that I genuinely wanted to tell her yes.

We spent the afternoons together every day after that.  If the weather was nice, we walked out in the open fields outside of town.  If it was windy or raining, she came to my door and we sat at my kitchen table and drank tea or coffee.  Before I knew it, nearly two weeks had passed in this way, and the time had seemed to fly rather than drag on endlessly, and I found myself asking her, "Why did you come here?  To Twelve?"

Effie stirred her tea for a moment before she answered.  "I admit I'm not sure exactly.  To see.  To remember.  Or reassess, perhaps.  I remember when I came here before, what it was like to hate this place for no real reason."  She looked up at me.  "I think much of my life has passed without meaning.  I wanted to see things and put meanings to them."

I remembered the way I used to mock the Capitol accent and marveled at how soothing I could find her voice now.  Strangely, i found myself smiling.  There was a kind of distant warmth somewhere in my chest, maybe just from the tea, but it was spreading into my fingers and toes now, and I felt better in that moment than I had in as long as I could remember.  "I can understand that," I said.

Effie returned my smile, but there was a little crinkle between her brows.  It was a tell I'd never noticed before, a sign that she was thinking more deeply than her vague smiles let on.  But here, in the space we'd created between ourselves, she shared her thoughts.  "It's much easier to live without meaning," she said.  "But now I look back on decades of nothingness."  Her smile fell.  "It makes me a little ill, actually."

I returned my attention to my tea.  The warmth receded, but did not die out completely.  "I guess...people do what they have to do to survive," I said slowly.  "When you're just trying to get by and someone's asking you to think about...more than just that, it's..."

"I sense you're referring to something in particular," said Effie.  We'd become so much more familiar in such a short time, I realized then.  Not so long ago she'd have shied away from prying, or I'd have snapped and stopped talking.

The image that was sticking in my mind today, for whatever reason, was the wedding dress.  Well, there was a reason, maybe, kind of.  Peeta had come by this morning, and I'd sent him away long before I knew Effie would come, but I was still feeling off-kilter from the experience.  We'd fought, sort of, or exchanged unnecessarily harsh words about nothing in particular, and he'd had this old look about him that I hadn't seen in years, kind of sad and hurt about something I couldn't place, and I remembered the wedding dress and standing in it feeling apart from myself, and the way Effie had looked at me, and the way it mattered but it didn't because I was so sure I was going to die.

And then there was Effie, with rain on her cheeks and the stormy sky in her eyes, and I wished for a moment that I could somehow take the two memories apart, her and the wedding dress, or even Peeta and the wedding dress.  But they were linked, and so was I.  Linked to thoughts of the imminence of things back then, of marriage and children or death and nothing else besides a little bit of time between camera flashes.

"Just thinking about the past," I said at last.  "Sometimes things still seem kind of...inevitable.  Even when they shouldn't be."

Effie was silent, waiting for more, for any kind of real thing she could latch onto, but I didn't know how to put a voice to my thoughts, so instead another thought, not entirely unrelated, came rushing to the surface, "How long are you staying here?"

"In Twelve, you mean?"

I couldn't look at her.  I nodded.

"Actually, I'd..." Effie paused for a long time--almost too long, and when she continued, her voice was quieter, softer in that way that felt blurred and washed out.  "I'd planned to leave a week ago."

Her words surprised me enough that I had to meet her gaze.  "A week ago?" I echoed.  "Why did you stay?"

Effie's gaze was unsteady, like she wanted to look away.  There was a strange little twist to the corners of her lips, so much different without vibrant lipsticks outlining their shape, and the faintest hint of colour was rising to her cheeks as she spoke.  "Because...I wanted to," she said slowly.

I frowned.  "Why?" I asked her again.  I was feeling strange and wrong and agitated, and I realized vaguely that this was the first time in awhile I'd felt these things in her presence.

Effie remained unchanged.  Chin held high, voice and features soft and almost hazy.  The only sign of the inner workings of her mind was that tiny crease between her brows.  "Because I enjoyed spending time with you," she said quietly.  "I...didn't want it to end."  Her voice broke, just the tiniest fraction.  "Any sooner than it must.  I'm sorry."

Objectively, it was bizarre, I knew.  Why should I feel like this admission was such a betrayal when I'd demanded it?  How could she understand so easily why I took it this way?  What kind of madness compelled me to send her away while also holding the words down in my throat?

It was because she knew.  She knew about Gale and Peeta, old wounds that shouldn't have mattered but did, the way they'd quietly asked for more than I knew how to give and the way the guilt hung with me to this day when it should have been long forgotten.  She could gather without exactly knowing that the look that lingered in Peeta's eyes wasn't one I could return, but it was one I desperately wanted to, because he was good and he cared for me and we took care of each other and maybe I didn't need fire or righteous anger or easy companionship. 

Maybe if I tried hard enough I could will myself to give him a fraction of what he'd given me.  Maybe if I stopped resisting fate would take its course and the wedding dress could just be a wedding dress and we could have children and they could play in the fields and they could grow up happy, and I could learn how to be happy, or at least whatever echo of such a thing that I might be able to grasp at.

So instead of doing anything, I was crying, and I was sinking, and Effie was catching me, and holding me while I cried, and I was trying in strange, halting fragments to tell her a fraction of the thoughts racing through my head, and her fingers were in my hair, touch soft, hands trembling, and she was here, and real, and she hadn't left because--

I stopped speaking nonsense, breathed deep, took in the scent of rain and something Effie must have used, like a soap or shampoo.  "You stayed because of me," I whispered, low and ragged.

"I'll go if you like," said Effie, running fingers through my hair in long, gentle strokes.  "We can write letters.  I can visit again, perhaps."

My hands unclenched, my arms unwound from my stomach, and my fingers found the sleeves of her blouse.  _Don't leave_ , I wanted to beg her.  _I don't want you to leave_.   _I can't stand the thought of saying goodbye, not now._  But I realized suddenly something Effie had already known: this was that same murky area I was so reluctant to traverse. 

For so long now my days had consisted of nothing but getting by.  Sometimes that had meant literally not starving, other times not collapsing into abject sorrow.  Now it mostly meant not lashing out and receding into my own private hellscape for the rest of my life, until one day death finally came for me and I wondered nothing other than what had taken it so long.

When someone demanded more, or maybe even quietly asked, I felt instantly like a cornered animal, even if I was sometimes the one who had backed myself into that corner.  People asked for words I knew in my head and balked when I couldn't put a voice to them: love, caring, devotion, even passion.  Concepts I could conceive of, might have even felt, might even feel, but there was always someone pushing, something else pulling, always a wedding dress that was more than just a dress or a kiss that was just for show or a memory that was too good or too terrible to be true.

And here was Effie, holding me as I came apart, waiting silently for whatever words I could give her, demanding nothing, offering something I could just barely bring myself to admit that I wanted badly.

"Do you have to leave?" I wondered at last.

"No," said Effie.

I wiped haphazardly at my eyes and sat up off her shoulder enough to look into her eyes.  I held her face in my hands and felt that warmth again, deep and strange and satisfying.  "Will you stay?" I asked her.

Effie smiled, wide and brilliant, no longer soft or faded or blurred or washed out, and somehow in this moment she was a thousand times more eye-catching than she'd ever been in garish pink or glistening amber.  She smoothed my hair out of my face, and when she spoke it was at once the Effie I'd always known and another one I'd never even guessed at.  "Why, Miss Everdeen, I'd be delighted."


End file.
